Single-shot simulations of dynamic quantum many-body systems

Single experimental shots of ultracold quantum gases sample the many-particle probability distribution. In a few cases such single shots could be successfully simulated from a given many-body wavefunction(1-4), but for realistic time-dependent many-body dynamics this has been difficult to achieve. Here, we show how single shots can be simulated from numerical solutions of the time-dependent many-body Schrodinger equation. Using this approach, we provide first-principle explanations for fluctuations in the collision of attractive Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), for the appearance of randomly fluctuating vortices and for the centre-of-mass fluctuations of attractive BECs in a harmonic trap. We also show how such simulations provide full counting distributions and correlation functions of any order. Such calculations have not been previously possible and our method is broadly applicable to many-body systems whose phenomenology is driven by information beyond what is typically available in low-order correlation functions.